Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com sums up ObamaCare after court rules that states without exchanges do not qualify for federal subsidies:

They took a crappy bill that they hadn’t read, they rammed it through on a party-line vote using a budget-reconciliation technicality, then they did an “I won” victory dance. Now it turns out the bill sucks and they’re blaming Republicans for not stopping them.

Short term thinking… ObamaCare was thrown together when the Dems held majorities in the House and the Senate. But the Repubs took over majority in the House, and as a result ObamaCare could no longer be modified without major concessions.

The language of the Affordable Care Act plainly says that subsidies are only available on exchanges established by states. The plaintiff argued this meant that, well, subsidies could only be available on exchanges established by states.

Thus we have convoluted logic attempting to defend something that isn’t logical:

The government argued that this was ridiculous; when you consider the law in its totality, it said, the federal government obviously never meant to exclude federally operated exchanges from the subsidy pool, because that would gut the whole law. The appeals court disagreed with the government, 2-1. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 million people may lose their subsidies as a result.

Because the Dems putting this monstrosity together didn’t bother to consider what would happen if they needed Repub cooperation later on. And now, of course, they complain about intransigent Republicans.